What the Fake News Fiasco Means for Media, the One Percent and the 99% (of the Population, the Popular Vote and the Future of Advertising)

Traditionally – over the past century or so, retard media have used what Noam Chomsky refers to as a “propaganda” model which relies heavily on advertising:

ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals.

– Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent”, 14

Traditionally, advertisers have thereby supported mainstream news sources with a “vote of confidence” which involve both financial support and also brand / image support.

A mass movement without any major media support, and subject to a great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave odds.

– ibid., 15-16

This was the media landscape for pretty much the entire 20th Century… and even today when people speak of “the media”, they usually mean such “mass media” or “mainstream media” corporations. For example: recently Robert Reich said in an interview with Amy Goodman (of “Democracy Now”):

The problem for the free press is that the more you have a president who is communicating directly through tweets and rallies, the less able are the press – or is the media – to be able to intermediate.

Mr. Reich apparently does not consider twitter.com (as in the quote above where he refers to “tweets”, he means messages published via that web site) to be a media organization.

In my opinion, twitter.com is a media organization – yet it is a very unreliable one. Many people refer to such organizations which allow anonymous user accounts to be created, such that people without any reliable identity are enabled to publish messages, as “social media” organizations (since they thereby apparently give all members of society a voice, or at least something like a “publishing platform”). Other companies operating in the “social media” space include most of the largest Silicon Valley “Web 2.0” corporations, including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and many others, too. These companies typically earn most of their revenues by advertising schemes linked to the content the anonymous publishers create… including what has since the final outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States been referred to as “Fake News”.

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election results, the population of the United States was quite obviously shocked that such advertising shenanigans are quite fundamental to the propaganda / media system (as described above and throughout Chomsky’s analysis, which is also surprisingly still relevant today, decades after it was first published).

One thing, however, occurred to me just the other day – and I think it’s an observation that although it seems blatantly obvious to me now, it has not even been considered in any significant way by the wider population. It is this: The financial foundation of the traditional media propagation system – mainstream advertising – is a matter of “the one percent” creating content for the 99 % to consume. The original revolutionary promise of the early internet and world-wide web was the specter of a multitude of publishers taking the reigns away from the closely held mainstream media corporations. The dotcom bubble and subsequent crash wiped that story from the table, and the generation of millennials probably never really caught that “bug”. Instead it was only remembered – if at all – as a traumatic nightmare… much like the Great Depression, it was more easily forgotten than explained, analyzed or even brought up. To engage in politically correct conversation meant to ignore that aberration, to put it off as the work of misguided or lost political activists, to consider as unworthy of polite discussion, to write it off as a fluke or folly, certainly of no consequence whatsoever.

Wall Street responded decisively and swept in with immediate and unrelenting action. Google was turned into a shareholder machine, and from that point on increasingly became Madison Avenue’s bitch. In order to make this acquisition go down like butter, there was no doubt some involvement on K Street, too – just as the DoubleClick acquisition seems to have also floated through without any reservations whatsoever. Today the manufacturing of Fake News is a process usually involving only a handful of companies, all of which are managed by the kinds of mechanics the publishing industry has dominated for well over a century. The owners have regained ownership of all of these crucial instruments. The new song is the same as the old song.

The 99% were simply left out in the cold. Many are illiterate, most lack other resources, and quite a few were simply locked up. Thanks, Obama!

America’s leading, Nobel-Prize winning economist dubbed this “The Great Recession”, noting that the “D-Word” was not allowed (I guess meaning something like: saying the D-word is impolite and might even have adverse consequences for an otherwise stellar career).

99% of the population were dumbfounded. What is more: Increasing numbers were transitioning to careers without jobs, like driving a car without any wage or salary to speak of. Many people began to see the world as “life without benefits”.

At some point, opium for the masses becomes a no-longer functional game plan. At some point, media is no longer the sacrosanct “intermediation” speaking “truth to power” (as Robert Reich says in the video linked to above). At some point, media becomes the enemy (or similar epithets Donald Trump often made use of).

Yet note again that Mr. Reich and Mr. Trump actually seem to agree as to what “the media” are (and aren’t). They are the retard media based on brand names and advertising, they are not the social media based on pipe dreams, Silicon Valley and the future. Whether new media are good or bad, there is nonetheless little doubt that old media have become disenfranchised.

Millennials will openly pull out their smartphones and manipulate them in public. Living in a fantasy world is a very neato thing to do when the real world is by comparison rather intolerable. They seem rather easily excited at the prospect of Steve Jobs, up there in heaven, being able to see their very own fingerprint. They have a hard on for allowing their hardware devices to transport them into the money. But of course it won’t.

The only place such a hardware device will transport a believing millennial is right into the lap of the 1%, who are ready, willing and perhaps thereby enabled to drain their bank account, to turn them off just as easily as to turn them on, and most of all to manipulate their belief system with Fake News. They asked for it. They signed up, and they got it. They have become card-carrying members of the opium-den machinery club, and they even worship it with complete steampunk fascination.

You know how this story ends. Our savior, Donald Trump, says he will Make America Great Again. Well you know what? In case he reads this, here is my message to the Donald: Help build the Underwriting Majority!